The Cadets’ first move in the Duma was to draw up an address in reply to the
address from the throne. Instead of a demand, they drew up a timid
request. Their second “move” was silently to pass to the order of
the day when their request that a deputation be received to present the Address
was rejected. This time they behaved still more timidly. Now comes the third
move—the debate on the land question, which has been included in the
business of the Duma.

All workers should pay particular attention to this question. The land question
is the one that is most of all worrying the masses of the peasants; and the
peasants have now become the principal and almost the sole allies of the workers
in the revolution. The land question will show better than anything else whether
the Cadets, who call themselves the party of people’s freedom, are loyally
serving the cause of people’s freedom.

What do the people, i.e., primarily the peasantry, want? The peasants want the
land. Everybody knows that. The peasants are demanding that all the land in the
country should belong to them. They want to throw off the tyranny of the
landlords and the bureaucrats. They want to take the land from the landlords so
that the latter may no longer impose labour-service upon them, which is
virtually the old corvée; and they want to take power away from
the bureaucrats,
to prevent them from lording it any longer over the common people. The workers
must help the peasants in their fight for the land, and also must help them to
formulate the land question in straightforward, clear and definite terms.

It is particularly easy to confuse and obscure the land question. It is easy to
argue that, of course, land must be allotted to the peasants, and then to hedge
this allotting of land around with such conditions as will make it quite useless
for the peasants. If the government officials do the allotting again, if the
liberal landlords are again appointed as “civil mediators”, and if
the old autocratic government determines the “modest dimensions” of
the compensation to be paid, then the peasants, instead of deriving any
benefit, will be swindled as they were in 1861, and there will only be another
noose around their necks. Therefore the class-conscious workers must most
vigorously explain to the peasants that on the question of the land they should
be particularly cautious and distrustful. As matters stand today, the question
of compensation, and the question of which authority is to “allot”
the land, are of the greatest importance. The question of compensation will
serve as an immediate and infallible test of who stands for the peasants and who
for the landlords, and also who is trying to desert from one side to the
other. The Russian peasant knows— ah, how well he knows!—what
compensation means. On this question, the divergence of interests of the
peasants and the landlords is splendidly revealed. And the Unity Congress of the
R.S.D.L.P. was therefore quite right in substituting the word
“confiscation” (i.e., alienation without compensation) for the word
“alienation” in the original draft of the agrarian programme.

On the question of which authority is to allot the land, the interests of the
peasants and the government officials diverge as sharply as do those of the
peasants and the land lords on the question of compensation. The socialist
workers must therefore show especial perseverance in explaining to the peasants how
important it is that the land question should not be handled by the old
authorities. Let the peasants know that no agrarian reform whatever will be of
any use if it is handled by the old authorities. Happily, on this question too,
agreement was reached at the Unity Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. as regards the
substance of the matter, for the Congress resolution unreservedly recognised the
necessity of supporting the revolutionary actions of the peasantry. True, the
Congress in our opinion made a mis-
take by not stating plainly that the land reform can be entrusted only to a
fully democratic state, only to government officials who are elected by,
accountable to, and subject to recall by, the people. But we intend to
deal with this point in greater detail on another occasion.

In the Duma, two main agrarian programmes will be proposed. The Cadets, who
predominate in the Duma, want the landlords to have their own way without harm
to the peasants. They agree to the compulsory alienation of a large part of the
landed estates, but first, they stipulate compensation, and secondly, they want
a liberal-bureaucratic and not a revolutionary-peasant settlement of the
question of the ways and means of carrying out the agrarian reform. In their
agrarian programme the Cadets, as always, wriggle like eels between the
landlords and the peasants, between the old authorities and people’s freedom.

The Trudovik, or Peasant, Group has not yet definitely formulated its agrarian
programme. It urges that all the land must belong to the working people; but for
the time being it says nothing about compensation, or about the question of the
old authorities. We shall have more than one occasion to discuss this programme
when it is definitely formulated.

The bureaucratic government, of course, refuses to consider even a Cadet
agrarian reform. The bureaucratic government, which is headed by some of the
richest landlord-bureaucrats, many of them owning tens of thousands of
dessiatines of land each, “would sooner accept the Mohammedan
faith” (as a certain writer wittily expressed it) than agree to the
compulsory alienation of the landed estates. Thus the
“settlement” of the agrarian question by the Duma will not
be a settlement in the true sense of the term, but only a proclamation, only a
declaration of demands. In the case of the Cadets, we shall again hear timid
requests instead, of the proud and bold, honest and open demands befitting
representatives of the people. Let us hope that at least on this occasion the
Trudovik Group will come out quite independently of the Cadets.

As for the socialist workers, they now have a particularly important duty to
fulfil. In all ways and with all their strength they should enlarge their
organisation in general,
and their contacts with the peasantry in particular. They should explain to the
peasants—as widely, clearly, minutely and circumstantially as
possible—the significance of the question of compensation and of whether
they can put up with leaving the agrarian reform in the hands of the old
authorities. They must strain every nerve to strengthen and enlarge the alliance
between the socialist proletariat and the revolutionary peasantry, in
preparation for the inevitable climax of the present political crisis. This
alliance is the only earnest that the question of “all the land” for the
peasants, and of full freedom and complete power for the people, will be
effectively settled.